Get Book Marked......

Hi Everyone!

How did you all enjoy the "Sugar Skull" Blog Hop we had in March - lots of fun????? I loved creating with Michelle's Day of the Dead Sugar Skulls Stamp Set so I decided to play around with them some more and I made these colorful bookmarks to share with you today!!

Supplies List:

• Sin City Stamp Set Day of the Dead Sugar Skulls
• White paper or cardstock
• Black Cardstock
• Ink Sprays in colors of your choice
• Black Archival ink & Black Stazon ink
• Sticky Note Pad (big enough to stamp sugar Skulls) for masking
• Colored string or raffia
• Shrink Plastic
• Colored Pencils
• Heat gun & heatproof tray
• General supplies: scissors, ruler, guillotine, double sided tape, glue, hole punch

Instructions:

1. Firstly you need to cut your white paper or card into strips for stamping on (you can leave as a whole sheet - ink spray and then cut to size - totally up to you!) You can cut any size you like - these are cut at 6cm width by 21cm in length which allows for 3 of the "skull" stamps overlapping. An alternative is to make your bookmarks shorter and just use 2 of the skulls!

2. Grab your ink sprays - any colors - remembering that lighter colors work best as they allow your stamped image to show clearly. You can mop up any excess spray with paper towel (the mop up paper towel makes for great backgrounds for other projects!!) Set these aside to dry while you work on the next step!

3. As you can see on the finished bookmarks the stamping of the skulls is overlapped so we need to make up some masks. Stamp skulls onto sticky note pad sheets and cut out - LOL remember to stamp part of your image onto the sticky part of the piece so it actually sticks to your project when masking!!!

4. When your ink sprayed pieces are dry you can start stamping!! Stamp one image in the middle of the strip and cover with the "mask" and then stamp skulls above and then below. I like things running off the page and at different angles for more interest!

5. Cut your black card slightly larger than your inked and stamped strips and adhere with double sided tape or a glue stick and punch a hole in the middle at the top of the book mark.

6. Now you can just add colored raffia or string to the tops of these bookmarks and call them finished but I still wanted to play with the stamps so I made some shrink plastic "additions" to add and what fun it was!!! Use black Stazon to stamp your shrink plastic (I had a small piece of clear plastic and also white - you can use whatever you have on hand - mine is years old but still shrinks perfectly!!)

Color images with colored pencils and cut out - remember to use your hole punch to punch a hole at the top so it can be threaded through after you have "shrunk" it!
Use your heat gun and a heat proof tray to shrink the plastic - shrinks to under half the original size.

7. Thread the colored raffia through the shrink plastic skulls and attached to the tops of the bookmarks, tie bows to finish them all off!
Now you have some bright and sweet sugar skull bookmarks!

Thanks for joining me today!!

And before I go here are some handy links for you!!
Sin City Stamps Store - where you can grab all your fav stamps!!!
Sin City Stamps Fan Group at Facebook - where we all can share our creations!!!
And of course here at The Blog where the DT share all their amazing creations!!!

Happy Stamping!

Sharon